How to Start a Travel Blog (Before You Feel Ready)

Jump to: The Steps | Your free travel blog checklist | Why you should start a travel blog | Write your first post today | Get the right education early

I started The Boho Travels in 2012 because I went on a trip I knew I would want to remember until I grow old. And even back then, I hoped someone would properly teach me how to start a travel blog.

A friend, Tara, wanted to travel around the Philippines and visit indigenous communities. She was part-Filipina and wanted to understand Filipino heritage — to meet more of our people, to learn where she came from. I said yes immediately. I had just come out of a relationship, so the timing felt right.

The trip took us from Kalinga in the north all the way down to Lake Sebu in Mindanao, with stops in Mountain Province, Bohol, and Samar.

We stayed with the Butbut Tribe in Tinglayan, where we witnessed a traditional Kalinga wedding dance and climbed up the mountains to meet Apo Whang-od and watch her perform traditional tattooing on Tara’s arm.

We lived for a few days at the T’boli School of Living Traditions in Lake Sebu, where the kids performed for us every night and where we met the T’nalak dreamweavers — including Manang Barbara, who has since been recognized as a National Living Treasure.

We tracked down the Eskaya tribe in Duero, Bohol, and listened to them sing the Philippine national anthem in their own dialect.

In between, we couchsurfed our way through — staying with fellow travelers and Filipinos who opened their homes, showed us around, and fed us. We crossed hanging bridges in Kalinga and watched kids play in the middle of the Chico River in Mountain Province. We rode on top of a jeepney going down a mountain from Mountain Province. We squeezed onto a habal-habal with four passengers and a driver — in the rain, in South Cotabato.

I came home having fallen in love with traveling, and with my own country in a way I hadn’t expected. But much more than that, I returned from that trip like a different person. I grew a lot over just two weeks of exploring off-the-beaten-path destinations, expanded in amazing ways because of how I conquered fears and bravely experienced a lot of firsts. I made discoveries and declarations about myself that have shaped the kind of person I am today.

I decided to start a travel blog that same year — because that trip felt too important and deserved to be documented. It was life-changing, an impactful experience I knew I would still talk about many years after. And blogging was the only way I knew to keep a record of everything we experienced.

That was over fourteen years ago. And if I could go back and hand myself a guide, this would be it.

📝 How to start a travel blog: the steps

Let me be upfront and tell you that this is a simplified version. I believe that when you want something put out there, make it as easy as possible to get started and hit publish.

So here’s what you need to get started.

1. Register your domain name. Your domain is your address on the internet. Keep it short, memorable, and relevant to what you want to write about. Mine is thebohotravels.com — I registered it the same year I started the blog.
2. Set up hosting. Hosting is what keeps your site live and accessible. I use Hostinger — it’s reliable, beginner-friendly, and won’t break the bank when you’re just starting out.
3. Install WordPress. WordPress is the platform most travel bloggers use to build and manage their content. It’s flexible, well-supported, and user-friendly. Most hosting providers — including Hostinger — make the installation straightforward.
4. Set up your theme and core pages. Choose a theme that’s light, clean, and easy to navigate (I recommend Kadence). Then set up your core pages: Home, About, and Contact.
5. Write your first post and hit publish. Write about a trip you’ve already taken. It doesn’t need to be perfect.

🤔 Why should you start a travel blog?

You’re probably expecting me to answer — so you can earn from it. You definitely can. It won’t happen overnight, but it’s entirely possible.

But that’s not why I think you should start a travel blog.

My true reason is this: Life’s too short.

I invite you to go pack your bags. Travel. Make memories. And document your experience. Capture those moments with photos. Write them down. So that when life gets tough, you’d have something to look back on — the people you met, the places you’ve been, the things you’ve done — and remind you that you’ve lived life fully.

There’s something else I’ve noticed over the years: when you know you’re going to blog about your trip, you become intentional with the places you visit. You pay attention to the experiences that you want ticked off your “done list”. You ask more questions and pay attention to the details that you might need when you write your post. You become aware of your emotions, the colors, the sounds, the taste.

You stay a little longer in the moments because you know you deserve being in them.

Your travel blog as your “done list”

Most people think of a bucket list as a list of things they want to do someday.

My idea of a travel blog is the opposite of that. It becomes a record of things you’ve actually done — a done list.

Every post you publish is a destination checked off, an experience you showed up for. A trip to a place you’d been meaning to visit for years. A UNESCO heritage site you finally stood in front of. A country you can now say you’ve actually explored.

I’ve been slowly working my way through Southeast Asia — all its countries, all its corners. I’m not done yet, but every trip brings me closer, and every post I’ve written along the way is a record that I went.

Same with the UNESCO heritage sites scattered across the Philippines. I haven’t seen all of them either. But I’m working on it, one province at a time.

I also intend to meet as many indigenous communities in the Philippines and Southeast Asia as possible, and the blog is where I keep track of those beautiful experiences.

And your blog can be that, too — a living document of a life fully lived — one post, one trip, one ticked box at a time.

🗓️ Write your first travel blog post today

• Write about a trip you’ve already taken. A place you visited last year, or five years ago, or as a kid in the backseat of a car headed somewhere new. The details you remember are already enough to start with.
• Ideally, you want to know who you’re writing for. But if you haven’t figured that out yet, write for your future self. What would you want your future self to know about that trip? What do you want your future self to be able to look back on? Start there, and the audience will become clearer as you keep writing.
• Publish even if it’s not yet perfect. Getting it out there, letting people read it and be inspired by your experience, is still better than keeping your post in your drafts. You’d never know how many people you’ll inspire to start creating travel memories if you don’t hit “publish”.

None of my early write-ups were perfect. But I still love reading them. Some I’ve archived; bits and pieces of them I’ve kept on posts that are live on my website today, repurposed and refined.

You will evolve as a traveler. Your blog will change with you. The niche you thought you wanted might shift. The audience you didn’t expect might show up. The post you almost didn’t publish might turn out to be the one that resonates most.

And if you eventually take blogging seriously, you’ll have to update and refresh your posts regularly anyway.

Perfection isn’t the goal. What matters is that your writing is authentic, validated by your own experience, and personal.

So don’t wait until you have it all figured out, because you won’t. Not at the beginning, and not ever completely. And that’s okay — what matters is that you keep doing it and you keep showing up.

📚 Learn how to start a travel blog with the right education early

If I could go back and give myself one piece of advice, it would be this: find the right education early.

I joined Scale Your Travel Blog — now rebranded to The Blog & Newsletter Lab — and it changed how I approached everything. The biggest lesson that stuck with me: you don’t own your search rankings, and you don’t own your social media following. What you can own is your email list. That realization shaped how I rebuilt this blog for the nth time around, and it’s something The Blog & Newsletter Lab actively helps you do.

I’ve written about it in more detail in my travel blogging tools post →.

💭 FAQs: How to Start a Travel Blog

💌 The Wrap-Up: Starting a Travel Blog

You don’t need the perfect camera, the perfect writing, or the perfect plan. You just need to start.

Fourteen years ago, I came home from a trip I knew I’d want to remember forever and started writing. I had no audience, no strategy, and no idea what I was doing. What I had was a trip that changed me and the instinct to document it while everything was still vivid.

If there’s a trip you’ve already taken that deserves to be written down, or a place you’re about to go that you know you’ll want to remember — this is the nudge. Start the blog. Write the post. Build the done list.

The best time to start was the first time you thought about it. The second best time is now.